Sins of an Electronic Empire

Destino is an animated short that was created by the Walt Disney Company in collaboration with Spanish painter Salvador Dali. It is a mostly wordless 6-minute film that follows a dancer as she wanders through Dali's paintings. The project was revived and completed in 2003 after being put on hiatus for more than 50 years due to the Disney Company's WWII-era financial woes. It premiered in 2003 at the Annecy International Film Festival, was nominated for an Academy Award, and promptly vanished into thin air. It is not available on any video format, nor it is available online. As of now, there are no plans to make the short available, which is really a shame. Two of the greatest artistic minds of their generation, and the collaborative result is stashed away in a vault, so to speak. These are the kind of movies that you hope something like the Internet would make available. I'd gladly pay a few bucks to buy this. But that seems highly unlikely now.
If such a work became available through say, download on a peer-to-peer (P2P) site, but still wasn't available via any legitimate distribution, and would never be released as such, what then does downloading it entail? In other words, the moral (and legal) argument against pirating music and movies is that you are obtaining a product without appropriately compensating its creator or owner. This argument has undeniable merit, so long as appropriate avenues of compensation exist. There isn't really a solid argument for downloading the new album by Linkin Park or something when I could have just bought it, other than the fact that it's free, but that isn't so much a moral argument. But, let's say there is an album that is no longer available in stores, and only 10,000 copies were pressed when it was released in 1950, of which 8,000 got mailed to an incinerator by accident. The only way I could theoretically obtain this album is by throwing down an obscene amount of cash in the direction of a shady ebay seller. But in this scenario, the amount of compensation to the owner is the same as if I downloaded the movie: zero. So if we're making a value judgment, the damage done by each action in this scenario is more or less equal.
What about music and movies that are available by some legitimate means? Besides buying a movie from a store who bought it directly from the distributor (in other words, a revenue stream from consumer to artist. More or less.), I could also buy it used, or new from my friend down the street. Or off of ebay, or any one of innumerable methods. But, technically, any of those latter methods still offers the same amount of compensation to the artist as in the first scenario: zero. So if we're still making the judgment based on who's fairly getting compensated, it has to still weigh the same, right? But there's another facet here. Someone who downloads an album still might not pay for it if downloading wasn't an option. They might just choose not to buy it. However, someone who's buying that same album off ebay IS clearly willing and able to purchase the album, but the artist is still not being compensated due to the means of purchase by the consumer. So in both cases we have the artist not getting compensated for his/her work (because it is their work, after all), but on the one hand potentially no compensation is gained from eliminating downloading, and on the other fair compensation for artists would be increased by eliminating resellers. What kind of value judgment should we make there? And I wonder, should the RIAA be suing resellers instead?